Swami Vivekananda Quotes

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Give up the idea that by ruling over others you can do any good to them. But you can do just as much as you can in the case of the plant: you can supply the growing seed with the materials for the making up of its body, bringing to it the earth, the water, the air, that it wants. It will take all that it wants by its own nature, it will assimilate and grow by its own nature.

Swami Vivekananda
I, for one, thoroughly believe that no power in the universe can withhold from anyone anything he really deserves.

Swami Vivekananda
Every successful man must have behind him somewhere tremendous integrity, tremendous sincerity, and that is the cause of his signal success in life. He may not have been perfectly unselfish; yet he was tending towards it. If he had been perfectly unselfish, his would have been as great a success as that of the Buddha or of the Christ. The degree of unselfishness marks the degree of success everywhere.

Swami Vivekananda
The secret of image - worship is that you are trying to develop your vision of Divinity in one thing.

Swami Vivekananda
Stick to God! Who cares what comes to the body or to anything else! Through the terrors of evil, say-my God, my love! Through the pangs of death, say-my God, my love! Through all the evils under the sun, say-my God, my love! Thou art here, I see Thee. Thou art with me, I feel Thee. I am Thine, take me. I am not of the world's but Thine, leave not then me.

Swami Vivekananda
There have been two lines of progress in this world-political and religious. In the former the Greeks are everything, the modern political institutions being only the development of the Grecian; in the latter the Hindus are everything.

Swami Vivekananda
You cannot take away one atom of matter or one foot-pound of force. You cannot add to the universe one atom of matter or one foot-pound of force. As such, evolution does not come out of zero; then, where does it come from? From previous involution.

Swami Vivekananda
Is there no room for art in the spoken language? What is the use of creating an unnatural language to the exclusion of the natural one?

Swami Vivekananda
Whatever you believe, that you will be. If you believe yourselves to be sages, sages you will be tomorrow. There is nothing to obstruct you.

Swami Vivekananda
My son, there is no rest for me. That which Sri Ramakrishna called "Kali" took possession of my body and soul three or four days before his passing away. That makes me work and work and never lets me keep still or look to my personal comfort.

Swami Vivekananda
Paris is the fountain-head of European civilisation, as Gomukhi is of the Ganga.

Swami Vivekananda
According to us, there are three things in the makeup of man. There is the body, there is the mind, and there is the soul.

Swami Vivekananda
The present is determined by our past actions, and the future by the present.

Swami Vivekananda
Men may have given millions of dollars and fed rats and cats, as some do in India. They say that men can take care of themselves, but the poor animals cannot...

Swami Vivekananda
The glory of man is that he is a thinking being. It is the nature of man to think and therein he differs from animals

Swami Vivekananda
There is this difference between the love taught by Christianity and that taught by Hinduism: Christianity teaches us to love our neighbours as we should wish them to love us; Hinduism asks us to love them as ourselves, in fact to see ourselves in them.

Swami Vivekananda
Our first duty is not to hate ourselves, because to advance we must have faith in ourselves first and then in God. Those who have no faith in themselves can never have faith in God.

Swami Vivekananda
If the poor boy cannot come to education,
education must go to him

Swami Vivekananda
Sincerity of conviction and purity of motive will surely gain the day; and even a small minority, armed with these, is surely destined to prevail against all odds.

Swami Vivekananda
The devil comes in many guises-anger in the form of justice-passion in the form of duty. When it first comes, the man knows and then he forgets. Just as your pleaders' conscience; at first they know it is all Badmashi (roguery), then it is duty to their clients; at last they get hardened.

Swami Vivekananda
Great occasions rouse even the lowest of human beings to some kind of greatness, but he alone is the really great man whose character is great always, the same wherever he be.

Swami Vivekananda
The very idea of an infinite in place would be a contradiction in terms, as a place must begin and continue in time.

Swami Vivekananda
None will be able to resist truth and love and sincerity. Are you sincere? Unselfish even unto death, and loving? Then fear not, not even death.

Swami Vivekananda
We may worship a picture as God, but not God as the picture. God in the picture is right, but the picture as God is wrong. God in the image is perfectly right. There is no danger there. This is the real worship of God. But the image-God is a mere Pratika.

Swami Vivekananda
The important thing is: how much less you think of the body, of yourself as matter—as dead, dull, insentient matter; how much more you think of yourself as shining immortal being.

Swami Vivekananda